2-day Amazon AWS Cloud Computing Workshop / Training Course

For an updated version of this workshop see here or contact me directly.

I’ll be offering a 2-day cloud computing workshop 2+3. May 2011 in city center of Munich. A second event is planned for Sydney later this year and will be announced by the Australian Oracle User Group.

After a basic introduction and the discussion of common misconceptions we will cover advanced topics such as how to achieve true elasticity, load balancing in clouds, queueing, notifications and databases in clouds. This workshop is centered around Amazon Web Services (AWS) technologies such as EC2 EBS images, RDS, SQS, SNS, ELB etc.

The workshop includes a free copy of my Middleware and Cloud Computing book, printed course material, a pre-configured lab environment to take home as a virtual image on DVD.

Please contact me via email for registration and further details.

Resize AWS EC2 Cloud Instances

Scaling for AWS and most other clouds is quite interesting. As I mentioned in my podcast on OTN and also in my “Middelware and Cloud Computing” book you cannot dynamically resize a running cloud instance. E.g. there is no API call to ask for 2.2 GHz CPU speed instead of 1.8 GHz or to dynamically add another 3.5 GB of RAM.

All you can do is switch to another EC2 instance type while the instance is not running. This is why I like to say scaling nowadays involves some granularity (since you can only select the next bigger/smaller instance).

It was alway possible to resize a stopped EC2 instance using

frank@ubuntu:~$ ec2-modify-instance-attribute i-d8bc3eaf –t m1.xlarge

Now this functionality was finally  included into the AWS Management Console. Jeff has a nice blog posting with many screenshots explaining how it works.